The Unlikely Collaboration of Dickens and Darwin: A Closer Look at the Three Reviews

Truth is a bugbear which is fast losing its terrors: we are getting more and more accustomed to it, and are less and less afraid to look it in the face. But then comes the old question, "What is Truth?" Mr. Darwin believes he knows, or is on the way to know. — All the Year Round, 1860

1833 when William Whewell coined the word scientist and in 1859 when Charles Darwin published his evidence that life has a common ancestor, neither man could have foreseen the ever-widening effect of their contributions. It would take time to make all apparent; both the word, the theory and their meanings would have to evolve. At first Whewell (pronounced Hool) was kidding about “scientist.” At a meeting he chaired of the British Academy for the Advancement of Science he wanted to calm down Samuel Taylor Coleridge who was arguing passionately that those engaged in the study of nature — natural philosophers — did not deserve the honor of association with philosophy. Well! Whewell quipped, let’s just add —tist to the other kind of knowledge, science, and call it settled. He couldn’t have known that his word would catch on immediately, soon become more important to society than the word philosopher and that now, every time it is said it gives prestige to knowledge over wisdom.

An Evolutionary Moment

Darwin’s gambit was something different and something much more. But the modest naturalist had a feeling his work would stir things up. For the rest of his life after publishing Origin, he had stomach aches and felt as if he had murdered something. We know now he had reason to feel anxiety, for his evidence clashed with many Victorians’ ideas of themselves and the origin of life. For us, science and the idea of evolution are central, but looking closely at the time when Victorians first received this news we see 1859 as an important evolutionary moment of social struggle and adaptation in which major pre-conceptions were questioned. It is remarkable how some Victorians got through the struggle gracefully, handling their anxiety and opening themselves to the new theory. These men and women, among them George Eliot, Charles KingsleyCharles Lyell and Elizabeth Gaskell, kept their minds open. To weather Darwin’s storm each of them had to balance their liberal tendencies with traditional thinking, and this required more or less of a struggle. Of course the struggle commenced before Darwin, it was part of the times, but his findings forced them to make public decisions. Gaskell’s struggle with religion started when her activism turned even the progressive Unitarian congregation to which she belonged against her. Eliot, though brought up conservative, was seriously committed to a liberal look at Christianity. Lyell, Darwin’s scientific mentor, at first could not support the whole theory because of religious scruples, and Kingsley was actually Queen Victoria’s chaplain. But each came to accept Darwin’s idea along with its religious implications. Their journeys bear a nice resemblance to the theory itself which shows life to be a process both liberal and conservative. For Darwin, the liberal aspect is the earth’s wide variety of flora and fauna, in a word its diversity which so fascinated him. This corresponds to the liberal Victorian idea of a more open society which led to the Reform Bills and gave the franchise to more citizens. As for the conservative aspect of Darwin’s biology, he found that despite their diversity, living things and fossils show such similarities that they must have a common ancestor. This corresponds to the conservative Victorian idea of ancestral principles and ideals that remain steady over time, an idea put eloquently by a liberal, John Stuart Mill, who said Coleridge taught him not to deny but to consider with respect any traditional doctrine that has “been believed by thoughtful men, and received by whole nations or generations of mankind” (“Coleridge”)."

Dickens’s Response

Charles Dickens, the enormously popular novelist, is usually counted as a detractor or as having little interest in Darwin’s concept. But study of the three reviews of On the Origin of Species†he published in his magazine All the Year Round leads me to the opposite conclusion. These witty and knowledgeable pieces of explanation and commentary show that Dickens was drawn to Darwin’s new view of the natural world and also impressed by the modest naturalist’s dramatic entrance onto the national stage. As both novelist and publisher, Dickens was an expert on how the times were changing, so the reviews convey his usual fascination with the struggle between old ways and exciting, dangerous new ones. His readers were certainly vulnerable to the assault of Darwinian thinking, but he was not. In fact, the articles show him standing sturdily in the swirling debate and losing neither his love of nature, his sense of humor nor his faith. The author of the reviews is as yet undiscovered, but I am happy to use “Anonymous” to stand for a smart, relaxed and funny man or woman Dickens supposedly hired to put together the reviews — or for Dickens himself. I am not convinced they were written by either of the two popular possibilities, Dickens’s paleontologist friend Richard Owen whose wordy, pompous style is evident in his review of Darwin in The Edinburgh Review or the comic writer Percival Leigh whom Dickens hired to compose folksy versions of the science lectures (text) of Michael Faraday which highlight a precocious thirteen year-old who explains the new theories to his family. After reading the reviews carefully, I prefer to think of Dickens himself as their creator.

In this article I present evidence that demonstrates Dickens’s respect for Darwin’s work, an unexpected compliment to the naturalist by the novelist. Because of this evidence, I surmise that in Dickens’s reviews of Darwin we can see an element of unconscious attraction to the theory and to the hard work that went into it. This empathy appears in Dickens supportive statements like “Natural selection can only act through and for the good of each being,” which is used twice in the first review, and “Natural Selection is as immeasurably superior to man’s feeble efforts [at breeding animals and plants] as the works of Nature are to those of Art.”

Then there is this passage from first review in praise of science:

We ought not to feel greatly surprised, nor need our esteem be deeply wounded, if long-observant, reflective, and reverent men suggest that we have hitherto misapprehended the modus operandi of the Great Artificer. Instead of wondering that man's views of the Universe are so incomplete, the wonder is that they penetrate so far, and in many cases apprehend with such clearness and certainty [All the Year Round Review One, my emphasis]

Many scholars note that there are cogent arguments for natural selection throughout each review. So I asked myself, who was this writing so fluently about evolutionary theory? He or she has obviously read Darwin’s arguments with rapt attention. I typed phrases of the passages into Google Search with the words “Darwin” or “Origin” added, and found out that almost all of them, more than three thousand words, are lifted from Darwin’s book and placed into the reviews with no credit and no quotation marks. Thus the reviews include reams of the naturalist’s own facts and postulates and spell out the theory which he had taken years to verify. What more impressive way to honor the new theory than by incorporating its author’s wonderful prose? But though Darwin’s presentation is straightforward and self-effacing —and Dickens must have admired this — he is given no credit. Scholars have never figured out where these botanical and zoological facts came from but assume they are by a science writer Dickens hired to take up Darwin’s part so he, Dickens, could show disapproval of the presumptuous ideas. But then why use the master’s own words, why not paraphrase or simply mock the gentleman botanist? To quote Darwin continuously was a major editorial decision; who could have made it but Dickens? It is understandable too that he would hide this attraction to the controversial, threatening theory from readers and his intellectual colleagues — even from himself.

I was impressed from first reading by the knowledgeable discussion of the natural world here that includes Latin names for genera and species. Their incorporation into the text communicates a genuine interest. Unlike the paraphrasing used by Darwin’s fellow scientist Owen in order to question and discredit the theory in The Edinburgh Review (text), the arguments are the discoverer’s own, newly minted. One-third of Review Two is comprised of Darwin’s own crystal-clear explications. This might be missed by scholars because there are 51 paragraphs and approximately 10,000 words in the first two reviews, but there are only 11 quotation marks applied to only 207 words, 140 of which are Darwin quoting a man named Newman or the reviewer quoting The Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette. So Darwin goes unrewarded, with 67 words attributed to him, the only unfair decision made by Anonymous. The other well-known 1860 reviews of the book by Owens, Wilberforce (text) and Asa Gray use quotation marks and centered excerpts as we would employ them.

Though plagiaristic, the magazine’s decision was also practical and profit-minded. Dickens must have known at once that Darwin’s argument was so well-expressed it would make literary as well as scientific history. Darwin’s words help the magazine explain the theory cogently, and it would have to be Dickens who wrote or approved the surrounding text which provides a context for readers — religious and reassuring. Perhaps this strange method of composition constitutes another first for All the Year Round, science writing for the educated layman based on the scientist’s draft but shaped by a brilliant editor.

The Modern Necessity to Keep an Open Mind

With all its turmoil over what to believe, the Victorian era is our laboratory in which to study the evolution of modern thought. It was an earlier model of ours, highly industrial and science-driven, in which old and new clashed daily. The spread of liberal education is key to both societies because of the need for educated minds that sift and weigh new ideas and help others meld these with older ones. In a previous article in the Victorian Web I looked at how a famous Victorian developed his open mind. In 1826, an episode of major depression led John Stuart Mill to start developing the modern liberal attitude. He felt a clash within himself between what he had been taught since he was a boy by his hyper-critical liberal father, the thinker James Mill, and personal intimations that basic conservative ideas (which his father despised) could add depth to liberalism. In effect, our liberalism evolved within the mind of John Mill. He gained respect for the past and for the variety of the human opinions around him and became the era’s most popular proponent of “full, frequent, and fearless discussion” to help knowledge move forward (“On Liberty” chapter II).

Now to 1859. Though he called it a theory, Darwin’s Origin tells a story of life he had discovered by looking, touching, measuring, and thinking. That is why we call science materialistic. It happened that his story collided with the dominant religious creation story, which of course is not materialistic. (We have evolved enough as critical thinkers that I need not explain that story — a way of explaining something through events over time — is used here respectfully in the contexts of supposedly opposite views of life.) In 1859, upon publication, the collision between Darwin’s scientific story and the religious story was inevitable because both stories were considered true.

The nature of Darwin’s challenge to Victorian minds strikes us when we read the three reviews which are among the first public reactions to the new narrative. I will focus on the first and second reviews which boldly put our two stories side by side.

Review One

The first Dickens review begins with Adam in the Garden naming the animals, then it pays respect to the parallel activity of scientists who separate living things into two kingdoms. God is brought into the review with no reservations in Paragraph 5 followed by 141 words from Paradise Lost about the divine origin of animal life. Referred to with awe as “The Great Artificer” and “Supreme Overruling Power” whose essence is “Continuous and Incessant Energy,” God is highlighted almost as often as natural selection which the reviewer portrays as a strong but newly-named “power incessantly ready for action.” Respect is given to Darwin for deducing that living things arose “from a very few primordial forms” and then things are again brought into balance: “This view does not deny the existence of a Supreme Overruling Power,” the writer continues with understanding; though if the theory is right, the power is “acting in a manner to which the minds of men in general are little accustomed.” “Anonymous” wants to assure readers that he (or she) knows that Darwin’s theory will confuse them: “The mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred million years; and therefore it has a difficulty in adding up and perceiving the full effects of many slight variations, accumulated during an almost infinite number of generations.” The author acts as a guide for readers letting them know all is well: “Natural Selection, according to Mr. Darwin is the method through which the Author of Nature has elaborated the providential fitness of His works to themselves and to all surrounding circumstances.” It is fitting for a populist magazine but also fair and unafraid to conclude that “the whole dispute rests on the effect which this consideration has on the mind” (my emphasis).

It will be helpful to give an example of the magazine’s method from the first review. Paragraph 12 balances the stories by making its opening a combination of the magazine’s words and Darwin’s that gives a subtle emphasis to Darwin’s reasoning: “It is clear that the innumerable species inhabiting this world have been modelled somehow,” it begins, and then the reviewer tips more towards support of the theory by continuing with Darwin’s own words “so as to be in possession of that perfection of structure and coadaptation which most justly excites our admiration” (Darwin Variorum). Before the end of the paragraph, the magazine fits religion into the picture nicely while at the same time applauding the new thinking of decent “reflective and reverent” men like Darwin. The how, religiously considered, may be a question of mode rather than of principle. Whether a wonderful adaptation of structure be
effected directly at once, or indirectly by secondary causes, the
perfection of the adaptation is alone sufficient to prove that it must
have been effected by Infinite Wisdom.​

The reviewer achieves an elegant synthesis of Darwin and Christian notions of creation in a kind of paean to nature that could find its place in a Dickens novel but has been borrowed from Darwin!

We see beautiful coadaptations plainly, in such a creature as the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak, and tongue, so admirably fitted to catch insects under the bark of trees; we see them in the case of the mistletoe, which draws its nourishment from certain trees, which has seeds that must be transported by certain birds, and which has flowers with separate sexes absolutely requiring the agency of certain insects to bring pollen from one flower to the other; we see them, only a little less plainly, in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or the feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world [All the Year Round 176/177.]

So ends the readers’ inauguration into the new way of thinking. All the Year Round, a periodical like one of Henry Luce’s publications from our time, Time or Life, combines the old and the new, allowing progress to happen while controlling for possible excess. Dickens cared deeply about traditional beliefs so the review mends potential tears in that fabric, but his business was to understand English life as it moved swiftly ahead, so threading through the piece is his sixth sense for what mattered at the time. Darwin’s book was big news. The age was evolving and Dickens knew most Victorians would not give up religious assurances but that they would most likely get used to Darwin’s progress as they were growing accustomed to railroad travel and the transatlantic telegraph.

The Other View

The positive energy and open-mindedness of the reviews is denied by a number of scholars who find them dismissive of both Darwin and of scientific work. This view might have started when George Henry Lewes visited Dickens at his home in 1839 and was “dismayed to find no major philosophical, literary or scientific texts in the author’s library.” To Lewes, Dickens appeared indifferent to the latest scientific discoveries. As the journal 19 reports, “Lewes’s damning verdict quickly became part of the critical consensus and Dickens was long considered ignorant of, unresponsive to, or even antagonistic towards the science of his era.” Despite Dickens’s new seriousness as he grew older, Lewes always felt he “remained completely outside philosophy, science, and the higher literature.” In 2010, an issue of 19 gathered contributors to explore “Dickens’s myriad engagements with scientific thought of many varieties” (Winyard and Furneaux). But for the other camp, Dickens is anti-progress, an old-timer holding fast to belief in an all-powerful Creator but also to his fancies —the mermaids and genies of his childhood—which he hoped to shield from the rough advances of science and industry.

In 1955 Gordon S. Haight expressed this view, that Dickens was “indifferent or hostile to the scientific developments of his age” (in 19). Likewise, in her 1998 essay “Darwin and Dickens, 1860-65,” Christina DeCoursey asserts that the first review calls Darwin’s theory “possibly, but not very probably, true” and rejects “outright the idea that evolution could apply to humanity.” However, after reading the reviews, one sees these are DeCoursey’s words, not the reviewer’s. DeCoursey does not appreciate that Dickens wanted to (had to) retain balance between the stories. Because the magazine reviewer gives belief and design their place, DeCoursey jumps to the conclusion that Dickens is dismissing Darwin. But the All the Year Round reviewer expressly asserts that the theory “is not necessarily irreligious.” Then in the second review the magazine gives more religious sanction to the theory by borrowing Origin’s famous line that life began with a “few primordial forms into which the Creator first breathed life” (albeit without crediting Darwin). DeCoursey simply wants to portray Dickens and his staff as afraid, and she claims to know what they are afraid of: “If humanity had not been created by a benevolent deity for moral purposes,” she has them thinking, “what were we to make of our existence?” and then she adds another cliché that it is difficult for people now “to appreciate the fear many Victorians must have felt.” Perhaps, but the review shows no fear; it embraces the theory’s newness. Three times more, DeCoursey uses forms of the word “reject” to characterize Dickens’s goal and ends curiously by summing up all All the Year Round’s thirteen thousand words on Darwin as “a resistant near silence.”

In his introduction to the reviews on The Victorian Web, Philip Allingham writes that, “the anonymous reviewer attempts through logical argument and copious examples drawn from natural history to shed doubt upon Darwin's theory.” But upon reflection this assertion leads us to appreciate the magazine’s fair response, because as noted, almost all the logical arguments for natural selection come directly from Darwin! The commentary added by Anonymous does not, for me, shed doubt but upholds the magazine’s plan. The reviewer sums up the plan in this generous Dickensian passage: “Before accepting such a theory, we, the multitude, must think twice. Well, let us think twice; thinking twice never does harm” (Review Two, 1860).

Relatively new scholarship by George Levine and Adelene Buckland, which supports Dickens’s awareness of scientific work, shows that he came to see that "Science does not merely "destroy" fantastical and aesthetic elements of mythology but reconverts them, complete with a sense of wonder and awe, into observationally-verified, scientific sets of facts” (Buckland). As you would expect, in contrast to the scholars above, Buckland sees the reviews as favorable. She points us to the fact that in his review of Hunt's Poetry of Science, Dickens set out his ideal version of science:

Science has gone down into the mines and coal-pits, and before the safety-lamp the Gnomes and Genii of those dark regions have disappeared . . . Sirens, mermaidsÖexist no longer; but in their place, Science, their destroyer, shows us whole coasts of coral reef constructed by the labours of minute creatures.... in those rocks she has found, and read aloud, the great stone book which is the history of the earth, even when darkness sat upon the face of the deep. Along their craggy sides she has traced the footprints of birds and beasts, whose shapes were never seen by man. From within them she has brought the bones, and pieced together the skeletons, of monsters that would have crushed the noted dragons of the fables at a blow. [Buckland, 179]

.

All the Year Round welcomed new ideas. And I hear Dickens’s voice or at least his approval when the second declares in 1860 that "truth is a bugbear which is fast losing its terrors." The first review also underscores Dickens’s open and interested stance when it expresses sympathy with Darwin as a fellow innovator:

The great majority shrink back in alarm at the boldness of his conclusions, and at the illimitable lapse of time which it unfolds before their wondering and bewildered gaze. He will hardly be surprised himself — nor will the reader — to find that the mass of his audience have ears but hear not, and eyes but see not — as he sees and understands the works of nature.

Quotes Without Attribution and Dickensian Touches in Reviews One and Two

“Dickens,” “the magazine,” “the review” and Anonymous will now be used interchangeably because it is agreed that Dickens was the powerful Conductor of All the Year Round and involved in all its projects. In fact, Darwin and Dickens are so intertwined in these reviews it turns out even some Dickensian touches are actually Darwin's words! For example, the naturalist refers warmly to a mother cuckoo as “the old bird.” In another comic touch that could be from a work by Dickens, Darwin sympathizes with some beetles who lose their battle for survival when they try to use their tiny wings to fly ashore: “as with mariners shipwrecked near a coast, it would have been better for the good swimmers if they had been able to swim still further, whereas it would have been better for the bad swimmers if they had not been able to swim at all, and had stuck to the wreck” (Review Two). Compare this tone to Dombey and Son where Uncle Sol of the Wooden Midshipman makes a sad-comic attempt to affect his own personal evolution:

As I said just now, the world has gone past me. I don’t blame it; but I no longer understand it. Tradesmen are not the same as they used to be, apprentices are not the same, business is not the same, business commodities are not the same. Seven-eighths of my stock is old-fashioned. I am an old-fashioned man in an old-fashioned shop, in a street that is not the same as I remember it. I have fallen behind the time, and am too old to catch it again [Dickens 41].

Review One

Paragraph 14 on the interrelationship of plants, bees, mice and cats comes from Origin of the Species edited slightly to excise bits of scientific terminology and enhance impact. For instance, to strengthen Darwin’s assertion, the editor makes the second sentence read “Humble-bees are indispensable to the fertilization of heartsease,” by shortening Darwin’s “are almost indispensable,” and he deletes a Latin term.

Paragraph 16. Dickens understands his readers and so the review declares that “the mind cannot possibly grasp the full meaning of the term of a hundred thousand years.” But these are Darwin’s words! The only difference in the paragraphs is that he calls the theory “a great change” and the magazine calls it “overwhelming.” But except for small edits, this is all Darwin»s own words presented as expert science writing by All the Year Round as in, “During the early periods of the earth's history, when the forms of life were probably few and simple [-er edited out], the rate of change was probably slow; [-er edited]” Then after the semi-colon the editor simply takes out and and allows Darwin to launch into:

At the first dawn of life, when very few forms of the simplest structure existed, the rate of change may have been slow in an extreme degree. The whole history of the world, as at present known, although of a length quite incomprehensible to us, will hereafter be recognised as a mere fragment of time, compared with the ages which have elapsed since the first creature, the progenitor of innumerable extinct and living descendants, was created.

Paragraph 17 contains this sentence which is not from Darwin but does sound like Dickens as editor or author: “With railways invading Africa and Asia, it is not difficult to hear in imagination the funeral knell of the last wild elephant.”

In the following passage I have italicized the final words of the first review. They are the magazine’s and a strong indicator of Dicken’s influence. They combine nature, social criticism and humor in a sardonic tone we are used to from Dickens’s fiction:

War is a more efficient institution for the preservation of the ferae naturae than at first sight appears. While the cat is away, the mice will play, and increase and multiply. Our battles, whether on a grand scale or in single combat, ought to be hailed, by our four-footed and our winged game and vermin, as most auspicious events. When hostile armies prepare to meet in deadly shock, the crows and ravens overhead caw and croak their approval; the rat in the hedgerow squeaks his congratulations to the fox in the brake; the bear in the pine-wood growls his deep satisfaction to the exulting chamois on the Alpine cliff. It is evident enough, that not many wild races of animals are likely to become extinct until wars shall have utterly ceased; and when that is likely to happen, we may learn by private inquiry of various European potentates, with a further reference to the powers of the western hemisphere.

Review Two

In Paragraph 7, 82 of 167 words are from Origin slightly modified. To introduce the paragraph in its voice, where Darwin said “I” the magazine simply refers to Darwin in the third person. “Our philosophical reformer adduces numerous facts which he holds to be inexplicable on the theory of independent acts of creation.” The last phrase is then immediately repeated lending it even more energy: “The grand facts are inexplicable on the theory of creation.”

Paragraph 8: 135 of 215 words are by Darwin.

Paragraph 10: 86 of 208. Smart editing. To make Darwin’s description of cross-breeding dogs more familiar, Anonymous adds a colloquialism, “the lurchers” to Darwin’s “shepherd dogs.” It also makes Darwin’s “giving them a tendency to hunt hares” more fun by adding the quip “making them invaluable to poachers,” a Dickensian touch.

Paragraph 12 begins with a plagiaristic rewrite:
“To understand how instincts in a state of nature have become modified by Natural Selection, let us consider the case of the cuckoo” which makes it sound as if this is ATYR’s idea. Here is how Darwin presents the idea:
“We shall, perhaps, best understand how instincts in a state of nature have become modified by selection, by considering a few cases. I will select only three, out of the several which I shall have to discuss in my future work, —namely, the instinct which leads the cuckoo to lay her eggs in other birds’ nests”

Paragraphs 13 and 15 continue on the cuckoo but to the phrase “she occasionally laid an egg in another bird’s nest” the magazine adds a Dickensian punchline, “by way of experiment.” The article then moves onto bees as if the reviewer had gone outside to observe them, but it’s all Darwin, his “I” simply replaced by “Mr. Darwin.”

Paragraphs 16-31. At least half of the concluding paragraphs’ 3,440 words are by Darwin and the magazine flatters him by using his own energetic words to celebrate his theory:

We are no longer to look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship — as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; we are to regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; we are to contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor [Here book and magazine underscore the beauty of the theory with the exact same words] Natural Selection can only act through and for the good of each being. [Soon after this both writers repeat this positive phrase, Darwin within a few pages, Dickens in the space of two paragraphs] as Natural Selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection.

Though each author writes his own summary sentence, the magazine’s appreciation is underscored by their similarity:

Darwin: “We can dimly foresee that there will be a considerable revolution in natural history.”

Dickens: “The theory, of which a brief sample has been given, entails the vastest consequences.”

Then Dickens does it his way, and it is hard to see this ending written by anyone else than The Conductor or at least without his enthusiastic approval:

Timid persons, who purposely cultivate a certain inertia of mind, and who love to cling to their preconceived ideas, fearing to look at such a mighty subject from an unauthorised and unwonted point of view, may be reassured by the reflection that, for theories, as for organised beings, there is also a Natural Selection and a Struggle for Life. The world has seen all sorts of theories rise, have their day, and fall into neglect. Those theories only survive which are based on truth, as far as our intellectual faculties can at present ascertain; such as the Newtonian theory of universal gravitation. If Mr. Darwin's theory be true, nothing can prevent its ultimate and general reception, however much it may pain and shock those to whom it is propounded for the first time. If it be merely a clever hypothesis, an ingenious hallucination, to which a very industrious and able man has devoted the greater and the best part of his life, its failure will be nothing new in the history of science. It will be a Penelope's web, which, though woven with great skill and art, will be ruthlessly unwoven, leaving to some more competent artist the task of putting together a more solid and enduring fabric.

Online Variorum of Darwin's Origin of Species: first British edition (1859). Web. October 8, 2015. http://darwin-online.org.uk/Variorum/1859/1859-60-dns.html

Winyard, Ben and Furneaux, Holly. “Dickens, Science, and
the Victorian Literary Imagination.” 19, Interdisciplinary Studies in the
Long Nineteenth Century. April 2010. Institute of English Studies,
London. October 8, 2015. Web.